AirPods – the most expensive backup headphones I’ve ever bought…

I have a pair of wireless Bose QC35s which are awesome, they are the headphones I primarily use because the noise cancelling is insane, and for my non-audiophile ears they sound amazing.

But they are big, and not really appropriate for use if I don’t have a bag to put them in. That’s why, until now, I’ve always kept a pair of wired in-ear headphones that I can take out with me when I don’t want to carry around a bag and carry case.

As an example, if I’m going on a night out I want to carry as little as possible on me, but I really need some way of listening to music on the train home (because nobody needs to deal with the last train home without music). In these sorts of situations, audio quality is definitely not at the top of my list, but portability and discreteness are; two things AirPods excel at.

That’s not to say the audio quality on AirPods is bad, although they leak sound just like regular EarPods, they sound great to me and I’ve had absolutely no issue with connection at all.

On top of being insanely portable, sounding great and being easy to set up, when used alongside an Apple Watch it’s a match made in heaven. The lack of track and volume controls totally disappears when you have access to both the Music app and the Now Playing “Glance” (you can add this to the Dock in watchOS 3). Better still, the Now Playing Glance lets you control Spotify, or indeed anything else that shows up in the audio controls section of Control Center on iOS.

AirPods are, currently, an extravagance. As someone who loves gadgets I can find ways to justify the cost to myself, but not everyone can. But they are new, and Apple knows they can make some extra bucks from early adopters (as they have done many times in the past, with the first MacBook Air, Retina MacBook Pro and 12″ MacBook as examples). Wireless is the future, and I long for the day wires are completely abolished from everything, not just computing. The cost of them will come down as competition becomes more fierce and the technology matures, but until then I can firmly say, these are the most expensive backup headphones I’ve ever bought, but they are truly, utterly worth it.

Author: Kane Cheshire

I'm a software developer (and sort of designer) from Hertfordshire.
I spend a lot of time learning, travelling and flying my drone.
I made MacID. You can check out some of my favourite photographs from travelling at http://kane.codes.
I'm also the creator and lover of Twicnic, an annual Twitter picnic event.
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